“G.  Tant pis pour eux!  Entre nous, if I had been Gladstone, I should have preferred the love of my own country to the love of these—­Slaves of yours.  But, tell me, how did you get hold of Gladstone?

“Miss O. Rien de plus simple!  Four or five years ago I asked what was his weak point, and was told that he had two, ‘Effervescence,’ and ‘Theology.’  With that knowledge I found it all child’s play to manage him.  I just sent him to Munich, and there boiled him up in a weak decoction of ‘Filioque,’ then kept him ready for use, and impatiently awaited the moment when our plans for getting up the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ should be mature.  I say ‘impatiently,’ for, Heavens, how slow you all were! at least so it strikes a woman.  The arrangement of the ‘atrocities’ was begun by our people in 1871, and yet till 1876, though I had Gladstone ready in 1875, nothing really was done!  I assure you, Prince, it is a trying thing to a woman to be kept waiting for promised atrocities such an unconscionable time.

“G.  That brother-in-law of yours was partly the cause of our slowness.  He was always wanting to have the orders for fire and blood in neat formal despatches, signed by me, and copied by clerks.  However, I hope you are satisfied now, with the butcheries and the flames, and the—?

“Miss O. Pour le moment!”

She is absent during the sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874.  “London woke yesterday morning and found that your friend Gladstone had made a coup-d’etat.  He has dissolved Parliament at a moment when no human being expected it, and my impression is that he has made a good hit, and that the renovated Parliament will give him a great majority.”  The impression was wildly wrong; and he found a cause for the Conservative majority in Gladstone’s tame foreign policy, and especially in the pusillanimity his government showed when insulted by Gortschakoff.  He always does justice to her influence with Gladstone; his great majority at the polls in 1880 is her victory and her triumph; but his Turkophobia is no less her creation:  “England is stricken with incapacity because you have stirred up the seething caldron that boils under Gladstone’s skull, putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology to overturn the structure of English polity:”  she will be able, he thinks, to tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break up the British Empire.

He quotes with approbation the newspaper comparison of her to the Princess Lieven.  She disparages the famous ambassadress; he sets her right.  Let her read the “Correspondence,” by his friend Mr. Guy Le Strange, and she will see how large a part the Princess played in keeping England quiet during the war of 1828-29.  She did not convert her austere admirer, Lord Grey, to approval of the Russian designs, nor overcome the uneasiness with which the Duke of Wellington regarded her intrigues; but the Foreign Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was apparently